Monthly Archives: November 2017

The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron is set to host the 2018 Red Bull Foiling Generation 2018 New Zealand, which will take place from the 22nd to the 25th February 2018.

Red Bull Foiling Generation provides talented young sailors aged 16 – 20 the opportunity to advance their careers through elite hydrofoil racing. The seven-stop series serves as a great training foundation for the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, which caters to competitors aged 19-25.

In 2016 the RNZYS hosted New Zealand’s first Red Bull Foiling Generation, and the first stop of the 2016 World Series. Olivia Mackay and Micah Wilkinson’s new-found foiling talent was undeniable on the Waitemata Harbour, as they took out the New Zealand competition, eventually going on to take the overall 2016 Foiling World Championship in Newport, USA.

The RNZYS looks forward to hosting this fantastic event in February and cannot wait to unleash another batch of fresh foiling talent onto the world stage.

How to enter

A maximum of 16 Teams shall be accepted for the event with the final selection of teams to be made by 15th January 2018.

Foiling Week, A Year In Review

Advancing the Community Concept for Innovation

When the Foiling Week set up its first tents along the sparkling shoreline of Lake Garda in 2014, a small group of excitable and tweaky designers, engineers and sailors gathered to share, learn and collaborate. Once all alone in their corners of the sport and the world, this was their moment to go beyond their own visions and advance the new field of “foiling” on the water.

A mind-blowingly short time later, as 2017 comes to a close, Foiling Week is on three continents, there are more than a dozen established foiling classes and the seeds of foiling’s place beyond sailing are sprouting across the world.

Luca Rizzotti, Founder: “In 2018 we are going for the first time to exciting locations like Sydney and Miami. We look forward to connecting with the amazing Australian and American foiling communities, tap into their latest innovations and spread the know-how around the globe. Garda is also promising to be bigger than ever with many requests from new classes. Finally, we see we are growing alongside our present partners and aim at having more on board to keep the foiling community ahead of the innovation curve, plus seeking impact investments for some of our new ambitious projects.”

At the heart of innovation within the foiling space, Foiling Week sits alone as a forum. But this is not an exclusive club. Forums in Europe, the United States and Australia are now opening up doors and networks that were once, by the very nature of competitive events like the America’s Cup and even geography, barriers to collaboration and development.

Cup designers once muzzled by NDAs eagerly bat around concepts with their counterparts at Foiling Week. Product developers racing to become “first-to-market” in the auto-foiling SUP space are able to explore production and distribution complications together. From the innovator to the end user, there is no doubt that this is a particular moment in foiling that transcends the sparks ignited by classes like the Moth, A Class catamaran and America’s Cup boats.

Foiling Week’s Responsibility

Following the success of the Foiling Week Newport, USA in 2016, the first forum outside of Garda, the event not only expanded to other nations, the 2017 event on that natural playground in central Italy pushed the boundaries of innovative forums into the social responsibility realm.

Though Foiling Week is not an authoritative organisation, its participants are a community of new authorities on this burgeoning area of innovation. And, as the most diverse, intelligent and creative individuals in sailing, they have a resulting camaraderie and drive to improve the sport and the world through their abilities.

Core values for Foiling Week were established in 2017 after the successes of the Safety Forum in Newport. Safety, accessibility and sustainability were each given a day at this year’s Garda event.

As the sun warmed the cliffs, before the clockwork thermal breeze drifted in, the sports’ and industry’s top minds dug deep into these topics with an engaged audience. Olympic gold medalist Jo Aleh and Moth sailor Josie Gliddon, both representing the Magenta Project, lead the accessibility forum by tackling the gender issues faced with women in professional sailing. Gliddon was able to condense the concept that hydrofoiling across the range of sailing craft in the sport increases access to women. In short, with reduced loads, requiring less brute force and more technique-based skills, foiling should open doors for women. But she is quick to point out that the sailing culture lags behind these innovations and some doors are still closed.

Josie Gliddon: “To continue to talk about accessibility for all in our sport allows us to address the equality and diversity challenges we face not just for men and women. We are extremely fortunate to be in a sport where boats can be designed and adapted and I think that we can go much further in this area. Even just small changes can make a difference – putting in extra purchases / ratchet blocks or having extra people on board results in strength and psychical size becoming less of a dominant feature that in turn opens up more opportunities to more people. That can only be a good thing.”

The same forum announced design efforts to allow disabled sailors to foil and gain instruction with a Paralympic champion on hand to lend insight. Legions of tiny boys and girls also donned helmets and life jackets to safely explore this third dimension of sailing.

Sustainability, that mystical term that covers everything we need to do to save the planet, is a value Foiling Week has brought to a tangible concept. Right off the bat, the Garda event offered entry discounts to presenters and participants who carpooled to the lake. Collaborations that highlighted the outrageous inefficiencies in the use of motorboats to run regattas have led to concepts that include automated, solar-powered mark set drones.

As for safety, the Newport forum produced a collection of sailors and race management officials from around the world who, independently, had been creating race management tools and instructional interactive videos to address the growing issues that arise from boats going three- to four-times the speed of previous race craft.

On the Water

The forums now spread around the world have become synergistic moments for the greatest brains in sailing to connect and collaborate on technical and social levels. But Foiling Week has tapped into the child-like excitement these and other participants have regarding exploring and experimenting on the sea with wind and craft.

The most advanced classes in the world are attracted to each Foiling Week venue to host championships and share their progressive crafts with the world. Beyond top designers and engineers, the elite sailors of the world place Foiling Week at the top of their event wish list each year.

Glen Ashby: “For me, to walk around the boat park is absolutely fantastic. There are so many clever people that have worked on a lot of different foiling boats and apparatus over the last few years. For everyone to be able to walk around, share information openly and look at all the different concepts that have been builtis absolutely wonderful.”

Francois Gabart: “I think it is just perfect, the Foiling Week, because there is a lot happening now in the foiling world. It’s good to mix all together.”

Beyond Sailing

One would think that foiling is now established and that there is a plateau, apres’ 2017 America’s Cup, in innovation with these technologies slowing influencing recreational sailing and speeds steadying out for the professional foiling craft. But the Foiling Week has matured, and its free-thinking drive for pure innovation is expanding.

Paul Larsen, one of the fastest sailors in the world having set the outright world speed record aboard Vestas SailRocket, gave Foiling Week a taste of the direction foiling can take the world. A privately funded design challenge has Larson developing a 100-foot transatlantic passenger ship that is a hybrid power/sail. “One idea is to take paying passengers across the ocean in luxury as fast as the Ultime trimaran Banque Populaire,” says Larsen.

This unique project has been combining a fabulous collection of old and new ideas. A Polynesian “proa” style set of hulls means the ship can only sail on one tack and must “shunt” to change tacks.

These fascinating terms tied to the dawn of navigation and civilisation were linked by Larsen to the futuristic concept of “energy farming.” Larson says battery banks store energy generated by hydrogenerators while the wing-sailed craft reaches across through the depressions of the Atlantic then uses this stored energy to power the low-drag hulls through the glass of high pressure systems. The same ship is envisioned to double as transport for commerce, similar to cruise ships efficient use of their holds as dry docks to transport yachts across oceans.

New Ground

Now, how does the rest of the world learn about what these innovators and collaborators are working on? The Foiling Week! And although this forum has been expanding, a primary aim of the organisers is to push the boundaries of online communication by making all presentations live and archived on as many media platforms as possible. Virtual reality and interactive experiences are also imperative.

Creating more and varied partnerships into the varied spaces outside the marine industry is also a must for Foiling Week to achieve its lofty goals of connecting more spaces and innovators. BMW, Slam, Gurit, Persico Marine, Marlow, Torqeedo and Ingemar have all been rightfully supportive of getting innovators together.

The efficiencies developed by the Foiling Week community fit flawlessly with the direction innovators want to take the world. Individuals like Paul Larsen, Jo Aleh and Jossie Gliddon see an endless horizon of possibilities. So does the Foiling Week.

The first ever WASZP Australian Championships are set to hit Sorrento Sailing Couta Boat club with a bang! The inaugural event will be conducted over the Australia Day long weekend from the 25 – 28 January 2018.

Sorrento on the tip of the beautiful Mornington Peninsula is a watersports mecca and the perfect place for this progressive class to conduct its first major event in Australia.

With around 500 boats shipped worldwide, 70 of which are in Australia, expectations are high for a good fleet. Unlike many ‘traditional’ classes the WASZP provides an environment that is user friendly for everyone. WASZP encourages everyone to come along no matter what level they are at with sailing/foiling.

Sorrento has already set in motion a fantastic program for the event, with both on-water and off-water events catered for. There will be the ‘WASZP Nest’, a place where competitors, family and friends can chill out, play some table tennis, beach volleyball and generally enjoy the vibe and beach culture lifestyle the WASZP encourages.

One of the key features of this event, is it will be conducted as an on-call event. The WASZP will race at the time of day that the conditions are premium, competitors will be notified the night before and a schedule of events for the day will be planned around the best conditions possible. This will allow less down time waiting for the right weather and more time enjoying the hospitality around sailing in world class waters and conditions.

In-keeping with the WASZP ethos the class will be hosting a number of different events throughout the series. Slalom, GPS and Marathon racing will all play a part in the event to complement the Championship Racing. These events will be scored separately meaning we will have our very first WASZP Slalom Champion of Australia to go along with our first WASZP Australian Champion.

These new events make it fun for everyone and allows competitors at either end of the learning curve to compete in different formats. The standard at the top end of the fleet will be first class, with recent WASZP Games champion Harry Mighel competing as well as class creator Andrew McDougall. Two NZ Sailors are making the trip over, Bruce Curson came 5th at the WASZP Games and Nick Olsen has been sailing well. Others who have recently bought boats include AST Laser sailors Tom Burton and Mathew Wearn and former AST 470 sailors Tom Klemens and Tim Hannah.

This goes with a large group of local Victorian and NSW sailors from a range of classes who have been putting significant time into their programs. Leigh Dunstan won the NSW State Championships at Wangi from Sabre National Champion Jon Holroyd, Tom Brewer and former laser radial world champ Tristan Brown were also competitive.

From the team at WASZP and SSCBC we can’t wait to bring this event to the masses and take sailing and foiling to the masses. It is so exciting to see how far this class has come in the last 15 months since production started and now we are building an exciting future leading to the 2019 WASZP Games in Perth.

Visit the events page: https://sscbc.com.au/waszp2018/

It is not too late get a boat for the Nationals with a container special price of $AUD16,200 inc GST there is no better time to get involved.

Foiling Week is pleased to announce the second edition of the Foiling Awards.

We believe the foiling community is pushing the industry limits in all fields, sailing building and design. The awards have been nominated by the foiling community and now the vote is open to all the foiling fans until November 23rd. Cast your vote for your preferred candidate at this address:

From November 5 – 16, the foiling community has proposed nominees to recognise the year best performance in the different categories:

Foiling Sailor Award presented by SLAM

For best foiling sport achievement of the year

Peter Burling – do we need to say why?

Paul Goodison – double Moth worlds winner

François Gabart – new solo 24hr record

Liv Mackay – Red Bull Foiling Generation winner

Jerome Clerc – GC32 Racing Tour winner

Foiling Project Award presented by Persico Marine

Projects still in design phase but not yet in production

Bucket List foiling proa

MW680F monohull foiler

Infinity 56 by Farr Yacht Design

VS40 Inshore Foiler Proposal by d3 Applied Technologies team

VOR Inshore Foiler Proposal by Schickler-Tagliapietra

Foiling innovation Award presented by BMW

For foiling design solutions specifically applied to flight control / design / construction of parts but excluding hull construction. It does include vessels not powered by wind

ACC automatic cant control foil system by AST

DNA G4 automated foil control system

Early Take-Off gear mechanism for Ifly15 by CEC

Foiling Production Boat Award

For foiling craft already in production and being sailed

SuperFoiler Grand Prix

Bénéteau Figaro 3

TF10 by DNA

Essentiel by Phantom International

H20 by Bruce Beca

Foiling Green Award

For foiling ideas, inventions, design, initiative that will have a beneficial impact on environment

SEAir, Foiling RIB

SeaBubble, Foiling River-Taxi

The Foiling Awards prize-giving ceremony will be on December 1st at Yacht Club Italiano in Genoa. The Foiling Awards are supported by Slam, BMW and Persico Marine.

BMW has chosen to present the Innovation category. The BMW Group has always encouraged innovation. This forward-looking philosophy has enabled and defined a number of important milestones in the company’s history.

SLAM present the Sailor Awards: “Predisposition to the future is part of Slam’s genetic heritage. It pushes us towards innovation and technologies that allow better performance, such as foiling. Always on the racing fields all over the world, featured in all the most important events, alongside the best athletes and the best boats, we are necessarily projected to experiment on new products to meet all the needs of the sailboat. Slam is proud to support Foiling Week as it is one of the important future of sailing.

Federico Repetto – Chief Inspiration Officer Slam”

Persico Marine and the Project Award are a natural combination: Persico Marine builds custom racing yachts for the world’s most renowned racing teams and private owners. Persico is highly regarded as a skilled, full-service supplier, always ready to share its technological know-how with its clients.

2018 Foiling Weeks calendar preview

The Foiling Awards close the 2017 season, the 2018 season starts early with Foiling Week Australia, from January 11 – 14 at the Woollahra Sailing Club, located in Rose Bay, Sydney. The program will be the classic morning forum with races in the afternoon.

After the Australia Foiling Week the show moves to Shake-A-Leg Miami in Biscayne Bay, Miami from 15 – 18 February.

This year, the Classic Garda Foiling Week will be from 28th June to 1st July at Fraglia Vela Malcesine as usual.

An exciting new era in America’s Cup racing has been unveiled today as the concept for the AC75, the class of boat to be sailed in the 36th America’s Cup is released illustrating a bold and modern vision for high performance fully foiling monohull racing yachts.

The Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa design teams have spent the last four months evaluating a wide range of monohull concepts. Their goals have been to design a class that will be challenging and demanding to sail, rewarding the top level of skill for the crews; this concept could become the future of racing and even cruising monohulls beyond the America’s Cup.

The AC75 combines extremely high-performance sailing and great match racing with the safety of a boat that can right itself in the event of a capsize. The ground-breaking concept is achieved through the use of twin canting T-foils, ballasted to provide righting-moment when sailing, and roll stability at low speed.

The normal sailing mode sees the leeward foil lowered to provide lift and enable foiling, with the windward foil raised out of the water to maximise the lever-arm of the ballast and reduce drag. In pre-starts and through manoeuvres, both foils can be lowered to provide extra lift and roll control, also useful in rougher sea conditions and providing a wider window for racing.

Although racing performance has been the cornerstone of the design, consideration has had to be focused on the more practical aspects of the boat in the shed and at the dock, where both foils are canted right under the hull in order to provide natural roll stability and to allow the yacht to fit into a standard marina berth.

An underlying principle has been to provide affordable and sustainable technology ‘trickle down’ to other sailing classes and yachts. Whilst recent America’s Cup multihulls have benefitted from the power and control of rigid wing sails, there has been no transfer of this technology to the rigs of other sailing classes.

In tandem with the innovations of the foiling system, Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa are investigating a number of possible innovations for the AC75’s rig, with the requirement that the rig need not be craned in and out each day. This research work is ongoing as different concepts are evaluated, and details will be released with the AC75 Class Rule before March 31st, 2018.

The America’s Cup is a match race and creating a class that will provide challenging match racing has been the goal from the start. The AC75 will foil-tack and foil-gybe with only small manoeuvring losses, and given the speed and the ease at which the boats can turn the classic pre-starts of the America’s Cup are set to make an exciting comeback. Sail handling will also become important, with cross-overs to code zero sails in light wind conditions.

A huge number of ideas have been considered in the quest to define a class that will be extremely exciting to sail and provide great match racing, but the final decision was an easy one: the concept being announced was a clear winner, and both teams are eager to be introducing the AC75 for the 36th America’s Cup in 2021.

“We are really proud to present the concept of the AC75 today. It has been a phenomenal effort by Dan and the guys together with Luna Rossa design team and there is a lot of excitement building around the boat in the development and getting to this point. Our analysis of the performance of the foiling monohulls tells us that once the boat is up and foiling, the boat has the potential to be faster than an AC50 both upwind and downwind. Auckland is in for a highly competitive summer of racing in 2020 / 2021.”

Dan Bernasconi, Design Coordinator Emirates Team New Zealand:

“This design process has been new territory for the team, starting with a clean sheet to develop a class – and we’ve loved it. We wanted to see how far we could push the performance of monohull yachts to create a foiling boat that would be challenging to sail and thrilling to match race. We’re really excited about the concept and can’t wait to see it on the water. We think we have achieved these goals – thanks also to the constructive co-operation of Luna Rossa design team – as well as the more practical detail to consider in terms of cost management and logistics of running the boats.”

Patrizio Bertelli, Chairman of Luna Rossa Challenge:

“The choice of a monohull was a fundamental condition for us to be involved again in the America’s Cup. This is not a return to the past, but rather a step towards the future: the concept of the new AC 75 Class, which Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa design teams have developed together, will open new horizons for racing yachts, which, in the future, may also extend to cruising. It is a modern concept, at the high end of technology and challenging from a sporting point of view, which will deliver competitive and exciting match racing. I would like to thank both design teams for their commitment in achieving, in just four months, the goal which we had established when we challenged”.

Max Sirena, Team Director of Luna Rossa Challenge:

“As a sailor I am very pleased of the concept jointly developed by both design teams: the AC 75 will be an extremely high-performance yacht, challenging to sail, who will require an athletic and very talented crew. Every crew member will have a key role both in the manoeuvres and in racing the boat; the tight crossings and the circling in the pre-starts – which are part of the America’s Cup tradition – will be back on show, but at significant higher speeds. It is a new concept, and I am sure that its development will bring interesting surprises”.

The world’s best sailors will line-up on Australian waters for the first season of the SuperFoiler Grand Prix circuit. Home-grown America’s Cup winner Glenn Ashby (Emirates Team New Zealand) has announced he will join forces with countrymen and fellow AC35 stars Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen – who spearheaded Artemis Racing in Bermuda – as the Australian crew to beat in the inaugural SuperFoiler Grand Prix (SFGP).

“It is an exciting beast,” says the America’s Cup winning skipper and recently crowned Australian Sailor of the Year, “The SuperFoiler looks to the future of our sport as the most innovative and exciting sail racing machine in the world today. Six of these boats hurtling around a two-kilometre course will make for thrilling sailing and spectating,”

For World champion and Olympic gold medallist Iain Jensen the SuperFoiler circuit presents a unique opportunity – “I am keen to support a project that puts Australia back on the world map. Leading the way and pushing the limits.”

The chance to learn off his America’s Cup nemesis Glenn Ashby, another intriguing side plot – “Last time I sailed against him it didn’t go so well for me. It will be great to have Glenn on my team,” adds the 29-year old, “Hopefully the old boy can teach me a thing or two.”

The salivating six machine line-up – which already boasts Olympic medallists, world champions and America’s Cup winners at the helm – underlines the momentum building for the nationwide competition.

SFGP CEO Bill Macartney believes it is the best Australian sailing line up ever assembled to race on home waters, and that more world class sailors are close to signing on.

“These machines reinvent sailing, and will bring a new audience to the sport,” says Macartney, “Given the breakneck speeds they reach we need the world’s best sailors to control these beasts and there are none better on the world stage right now than these three supremely talented athletes.”

The marquee sailors are hoping to use the sleek foiling monsters to bring a new audience to the sport of sailing, “I think there is a genuine analogy between the SuperFoiler Grand Prix and Twenty20 cricket. I hope to see lots of kids and adults connect with what this series has to offer,” says Glenn Ashby.

That’s a sentiment echoed by his new team-mate Nathan Outteridge, “Audiences can expect a high speed, high adrenalin racing experience: some of the world’s best foiling sailors going hell-for-leather on tight causes, on very fast machines.”

Round one of the five event series launches in Adelaide on the first weekend in February.

The SuperFoiler Grand Prix will broadcast 24 hours of innovative, immersive on-board sailing content across the Seven Network in 2018.

Renders & Text sent by Viktor Brejcha, who was part of the design team for the inshore Foiler proposal by Schickler-Tagliapietra / www.styacht.com. I remember asking Paul Larsen on the future of sailing and told me how he he was literally flying over the water, not in the terms we see today with modern foilers but literally flying with only mms of Vestas Rocket foils. Check that interview here.

Below comments from Viktor Brejcha on the ST VOR Foiler
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“The ST Foiler project was originated back in mid 2015, with some our of the box thinking. we asked ourselves: “forsee the evolution of foiling sailing multihull design will have a parallel track to aircraft design?” & “what can be learned from the evolution of powered hydrofoil boats?” As a partnership between a naval architect and an aerospace engineer, it was a fruitful thought experiment. We knew that a containerized short course racing machine which could exploit the full potential of hydrodynamics to foil early and often, would be attractive. Both the economics and safety of existing and proposed cat designs left room for improvement.

The concept was developed internally in this way and eventually discussed in the Yacht Racing Forum in Malta. The core ideas: canard arrangement, no movement of crew and use of flapped T foils.

Each idea had implications, with their pros & cons. Some of the finest minds at the heart of multihull racing could see the potential. But it was still just a concept. When VOR went looking for proposals for their inshore racer , we knew it was time to go for it.

The concept was fleshed out with additional design hours, VPP work, styling, ergonomics, and flight stability simulations. Ideas were rejected, rethought or if they could not be topped, folded into the project. The result is exciting and coherent in its design choices.

We received rave reviews from VOR, but their fight against the calendar prevented the continuation to a build program”.

WASZP is very pleased to announce that the 2019 WASZP Games are heading down under, after an extensive search we have reached our destination of Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club. The dates of 22- 28 January will mean the classic ‘Fremantle Doctor’ will pump in every day at 18-22 knots and it will be provide a sensational spectacle of speed and colour.

The key areas WASZP wanted to address in our search for an appropriate venue are, world class race track, social, fun and wind. RFBYC ticked all the boxes! The fantastic clubhouse that will allow for some stadium style racing, the open expanses of Melville water on the Swan River provides an ideal location for an International Championship to be conducted. The race management understands the WASZP’s needs to explore other racing formats like Slalom and GPS racing. Being nestled about halfway between Fremantle and the City as well as having the world-famous Cottesloe beach just behind where the club sits means it is the ideal place for visitors to experience WA.

With Perth now starting to establish a fleet of this new and exciting class, it seemed the perfect time to head to Western Australia to unleash the WASZP on flat water and the hot summer sea-breezes that appear at 20 knots like clockwork. Australia now has around 60 boats and envisage that over 100 WASZP’s will be sailing around the country by January 2019. This compliments the fact there are around 500 boats now delivered around the world only 14 months after production began. We expect containers of boats from the UK, Europe, USA and New Zealand to join the Aussie fleet culminating in a fleet of well over 100.

Following on from the initial success of the inaugural WASZP Games on Lake Garda in Italy, the class has really kicked off with a fantastic beach culture social scene and great racing across some different formats in 30 different countries . WASZP is very keen to keep pushing these key areas of the class. We want people to have fun when they go to a regatta, more than that we want people to bring friends and family to enjoy the event as well. We are an all inclusive class and what better place than Perth to showcase this.